#wanttheirserfsback — Public Fediverse posts

The wealthy and corporations want to control the country and have no use for democracy. They only want power and money. They see people as a means to getting money and power, not as equals. They want their serfs back!

The memo that broke American politics by Robert Reich
https://www.rawstory.com/lewis-powell/

#GreedKills
#GOPInBedWithRich
#GOPCorporateShills
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#MoneyIsNotSpeech
#CorporationsRNotPeople
#LewisPowellSucks
#WantTheirSerfsBack

"In 1971, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce asked Lewis Powell, a corporate attorney who would go on to become a Supreme Court justice, to draft a memo on the state of the country.

Powell’s memo argued that the American economic system was “under broad attack” from consumer, labor, and environmental groups.

In reality, these groups were doing nothing more than enforcing the implicit social contract that had emerged at the end of the Second World War. They wanted to ensure corporations were responsive to all their stakeholders — workers, consumers, and the environment — not just their shareholders.

But Powell and the Chamber saw it differently. In his memo, Powell urged businesses to mobilize for political combat, and stressed that the critical ingredients for success were joint organizing and funding.

The Chamber distributed the memo to leading CEOs, large businesses, and trade associations — hoping to persuade them that Big Business could dominate American politics in ways not seen since the Gilded Age.

It worked.

The Chamber’s call for a business crusade birthed a new corporate-political industry practically overnight. Tens of thousands of corporate lobbyists and political operatives descended on Washington and state capitals across the country.

I should know — I saw it happen with my own eyes.

In 1976, I worked at the Federal Trade Commission. Jimmy Carter had appointed consumer advocates to battle big corporations that for years had been deluding or injuring consumers.

Yet almost everything we initiated at the FTC was met by unexpectedly fierce political resistance from Congress. At one point, when we began examining advertising directed at children, Congress stopped funding the agency altogether, shutting it down for weeks.

I was dumbfounded. What had happened?

In three words, The Powell Memo.

Lobbyists and their allies in Congress, and eventually the Reagan administration, worked to defang agencies like the FTC — and to staff them with officials who would overlook corporate misbehavior.

Their influence led the FTC to stop seriously enforcing antitrust laws — among other things — allowing massive corporations to merge and concentrate their power even further.
...
Meanwhile, Justice Lewis Powell used the Court to chip away at restrictions on corporate power in politics. His opinions in the 1970s and 80s laid the foundation for corporations to claim free speech rights in the form of financial contributions to political campaigns.

Put another way — without Lewis Powell, there would probably be no Citizens United — the case that threw out limits on corporate campaign spending as a violation of the “free speech” of corporations.

These actions have transformed our political system. Corporate money supports platoons of lawyers, often outgunning any state or federal attorneys who dare to stand in their way. Lobbying has become a $3.7 billion dollar industry.

Corporations regularly outspend labor unions and public interest groups during election years. And too many politicians in Washington represent the interests of corporations — not their constituents. As a result, corporate taxes have been cut, loopholes widened, and regulations gutted.

Corporate consolidation has also given companies unprecedented market power, allowing them to raise prices on everything from baby formula to gasoline. Their profits have jumped into the stratosphere — the highest in 70 years.

But despite the success of the Powell Memo, Big Business has not yet won. The people are beginning to fight back.

First, antitrust is making a comeback. Both at the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department we’re seeing a new willingness to take on corporate power.

Second, working people are standing up. Across the country workers are unionizing at a faster rate than we’ve seen in decades — including at some of the biggest corporations in the world — and they’re winning.

Third, campaign finance reform is within reach. Millions of Americans are intent on limiting corporate money in politics – and politicians are starting to listen.

All of these tell me that now is our best opportunity in decades to take on corporate power — at the ballot box, in the workplace, and in Washington.

Let’s get it done."

Part 2: This is all part of the wealthy/corporate plot to control the government so they can't be restrained, regulated, fined, taxed, etc.. Oh, and they definitely want their serfs back!!

'Judicial supremacy': How the Supreme Court usurped the other two branches of government - Alternet.org https://www.alternet.org/judicial-supremacy-supreme-court-usurped/

#PartisanCaptureOfJudiciary
#PartisanSupremeCourt
#PartisanJudges
#WantTheirSerfsBack

"Another current Supreme Court case that worries Wehle is Moore v. Harper, which deals with partisan gerrymandering in North Carolina and a far-right legal idea known as the independent state legislature (ISL) theory. The ISL, in its most severe form, argues that only state legislatures have a right govern elections at the state level — not governors, not state supreme courts, not judges.

“The implications of Moore are even graver than those in Milligan,” Wehle warns. “The legislators are arguing that under the U.S. Constitution, only state legislatures or Congress can decide the rules governing federal elections — state courts and state constitutions are meaningless. This independent state legislature theory was repeatedly raised with no success by Trump and his supporters seeking to overturn the election in 2020.”

Wehle continues, “But what was unthinkable then — a ruling that takes elections away from voters by mandating as a matter of constitutional law that state legislatures have unfettered power to ultimately decide them — is very real now…. If the independent state legislature theory nonetheless carries the day, it would mean that a state legislature could violate the very state constitution that created it. Voters would, once again, be the losers at the Supreme Court — despite multiple laws designed to protect them.”

Wehle wraps up her article by arguing that today’s Supreme Court is more radical than conservative.

“Alas, the conservative justices on this Court have already shown their hand,” Wehle writes. “They don’t care about precedent, let alone intellectual integrity. As a result, Americans may be in for a rude awakening. Indeed, perhaps it’s time to retire the label ‘conservative’ when referring to the majority of this Court. Each term gives further evidence of its decidedly unconstrained unconservatism. And the future of our precious Constitution is in their hands.”"

Part 1 This is all part of the wealthy/corporate plot to control the government so they can't be restrained, regulated, fined, taxed, etc.. Oh, and they definitely want their serfs back!!

'Judicial supremacy': How the Supreme Court usurped the other two branches of government - Alternet.org https://www.alternet.org/judicial-supremacy-supreme-court-usurped/

#PartisanCaptureOfJudiciary
#PartisanSupremeCourt
#PartisanJudges
#WantTheirSerfsBack

"In 2023, there will be a lot of gridlock in Washington, D.C., with Republicans having a small majority in the U.S. House of Representatives while Democrats will still control the White House and the U.S. Senate. Democrats performed much better than expected in the 2022 midterms, losing the House but slightly increasing their narrow majority in the Senate and winning key gubernatorial races in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona and other swing states.

But even if the United States had taken a hard-left turn in 2020 and 2022 — even if Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont were president and Democrats had large majorities in both branches of Congress going in 2023 — the country would still have its most radical-right Supreme Court in generations. And the High Court won’t be moving to the center, let alone the left, anyone soon. It’s entirely possible that all three of the Gen-X justices President Donald Trump appointed (Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch) will still be on the Court 30 years from now.

The Court’s far-right turn is the focus of articles published by the New York Times and the conservative website The Bulwark on December 19. In the Times piece, journalist Adam Liptak emphasizes that today’s Supreme Court wields more power than other branches of the federal government.

“The conventional critique of the Supreme Court these days is that it has lurched to the right and is out of step with the public on many issues,” Liptak explains. “That is true so far as it goes. But a burst of recent legal scholarship makes a deeper point, saying the current Court is distinctive in a different way: It has rapidly been accumulating power at the expense of every other part of the government.”

Liptak notes what Stanford University law professor Mark A. Lemley had to say about the High Court in an article published by the Harvard Law Review on November 20.

Lemley wrote, “The Court has not been favoring one branch of government over another, or favoring states over the federal government, or the rights of people over governments. Rather, it is withdrawing power from all of them at once…. It is a Court that is consolidating its power, systematically undercutting any branch of government, federal or state, that might threaten that power, while at the same time undercutting individual rights.”

Lemley’s article was headlined “The Imperial Supreme Court” — a characterization that Liptak doesn’t disagree with. And Liptak points out that according to Rebecca L. Brown and Lee Epstein of the University of Southern California (USC), the High Court “is establishing a position of judicial supremacy over the president and Congress.”

Liptak also quotes University of California, Berkeley law professor Tejas N. Narechania, who wrote, “The Roberts Court, more than any other Court in history, uses its docket-setting discretion to select cases that allow it to revisit and overrule precedent.”

In an article she wrote for The Bulwark, University of Baltimore law professor Kimberly Wehle stresses that the Roberts Court has been showing a total disregard for precedent. Discussing the case Merrill v. Milligan, Wehle points out that how the Court ruled in the past isn’t a major concern for this edition of the Court.

“After the Dobbs ruling overturning Roe v. Wade last term,” Wehle writes, “it’s clear that the Court’s majority is not shy about overturning precedent, however entrenched it may be…. At issue in Merrill, which was argued on October 4, is whether Alabama’s newly redrawn congressional map illegally discriminates against Black voters under the Voting Rights Act (VRA). A three-judge lower-court panel, including two Trump appointees, agreed with the plaintiffs, deeming the Alabama map illegal and mandating the creation of a new one. If the Supreme Court sides with Alabama, it would mean another reversal of established precedent interpreting Section 2 of the VRA in a 1986 case called Thornburg v. Gingles. Even worse, it would be another serious gut-punch to Congress’ ability to pass laws remedying systemic discrimination, this time in voting.”

Part 3
Opinion | This Is the Dying Phase of Reaganism—and It's Hideous | Thom Hartmann https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/12/18/dying-phase-reaganism-and-its-hideous

#NeoLiberalism
#Reaganism
#GOPInBedWithRich
#WantTheirSerfsBack

"...As the GOP’s game of shilling for corporations and the morbidly rich became obvious, support for the party slipped. Needing more votes to gain and hold political office, Republicans reached out to bigots, racists, misogynists, antisemites, and open fascists. Each slice of that poison pie gave them a few percent more votes.

When working class white men realized they’d been screwed by 40 years of Reaganism, they were unsure where to focus their rage.

Republican politicians and right-wing media were happy to supply the villains: women in the workplace when they should be home barefoot and pregnant; racial minorities who “want your job” or to “rape your daughter”; and queer people who are “after your children.”

Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign for president with a speech to an all-white audience near Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three Civil Rights activists were brutally murdered. His topic was “state’s rights.”

Bush the Elder rolled out his Willy Horton ad and George the younger lied us into two wars with Muslim nations.

Finally, like an evil Santa, Trump dumped out his bag of malice, malevolence, and odium. He embraced the world’s worst despots, seeing them as role models for a future America, while trashing our allies and disparaging democracy. He applauded police violence and ridiculed its victims.

Demagogues like DeSantis and Abbott further raised the temperature by accusing career public school teachers of promoting “Critical Race Theory” and librarians of hustling perversion and porn.

They used desperate refugees as human pawns in their vicious game. They purged millions of mostly Black, Hispanic, and young voters from the rolls, a process endorsed by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court in 2018.

Our most recent Republican President of the United States is hawking NFT art and facing decades in prison in multiple state and federal venues for his crimes while in office.

Now, at the end of these forty-one short years of this unrelenting barrage of corruption and hate promoted by Republican media and politicians, we’ve arrived at the end stage of Reaganism. As a result, our nation stands upon a precipice:

Will we continue down Reagan’s path that I charted in my book on neoliberalism and end up, as did Russia and Hungary, with neofascist strongman rule and a total collapse of the American experiment?

Or will we turn back to the lessons of the New Deal and Great Society, embraced by presidents and politicians of both parties for a half-century, and rebuild our middle class and our democracy, along with our trust in each other?

For most of the past 41 years the choice has not been as clear to as many people as it is today. Now that America can no long plead uncertainty, we must seize hold of the awesome responsibility for rescuing our nation and her democracy from the extraordinary damage of Reagan’s neoliberalism.

For ourselves, our nation, our children and grandchildren, and the larger world."

Part 2
Opinion | This Is the Dying Phase of Reaganism—and It's Hideous | Thom Hartmann https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/12/18/dying-phase-reaganism-and-its-hideous

#NeoLiberalism
#Reaganism
#GOPInBedWithRich
#WantTheirSerfsBack

"...Prior to this, from the end of the Republican Great Depression right up until the Reagan Revolution — from 1933 to 1981 — the American middle class had a half-century of uninterrupted political and economic progress. About two-thirds of Americans were in the middle class when Reagan was elected in 1980.

Before Reagan, we’d passed the right to unionize, which built America’s first middle class. We passed unemployment insurance and workplace safety rules to protect workers. Social Security largely ended poverty among the elderly, and Medicare provided them with health security.

A top personal income tax rate between 74% and 91% throughout that period kept wages strong for working people and prevented the corrosive wealth inequality we see today. We didn’t get our first billionaire until after the Reagan revolution.

America built colleges that were free or affordable; gleaming new nonprofit hospitals; the world’s finest system of public schools; and new roads, bridges, rail, and airports from coast to coast.

We cleaned up the environment with the Environmental Protection Agency, cleaned up politics with the Federal Elections Commission, cleaned up corporate backroom deals with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We outlawed banks from gambling with our deposits via the Glass-Steagall law.

Then the Supreme Court legalized political bribery with the Buckley and Bellotti decisions (and tripled-down on them both with Citizens United in 2010).

Reagan was the first modern American president to jump through this newly opened door to giving government favors to corporations and wealthy individuals who threw their money at his political party.

He installed America’s first anti-labor Secretary of Labor, our first anti-environmentalist in charge of the EPA (Neal Gorsuch’s mother, Anne), our first anti-public-schools crusader as Secretary of Education, and our first end-times “Jesus will make all things new” fanatic in charge of selling off public lands as Secretary of the Interior.

He cut the top income tax rate on the morbidly rich from 74% to 27%, and tore the top rate for corporations from 50% down to 25%.

To pay for both, he tripled the national debt.

He crushed unions, starting with one of only three that had supported his candidacy: the Professional Air Traffic Controllers (PATCO). He gutted federal support to education, kicking off what is today’s student debt crisis.

He froze the minimum wage. He cut federal benefits to the poor, pregnant women, and the mentally ill, kicking off today’s crisis of homelessness. He encouraged corporations to send our jobs overseas in an orgy of “free trade.”

As a result, money flowed into the GOP like an unending river, continuing to this moment. The result we see today, after a mere 41 years, is stark.

Republican-leaning businesses bought up radio stations from coast-to-coast and put “conservative” talk radio into every town and city in America. Wealthy people began running for political office or supporting those politicians who’d do their bidding.

Conservative donors demanded right-wing economics and political science professors in universities across America. Right-wing think tanks and publishers were funded to support them. Billionaires founded a movement to pack our courts, including the Supreme Court.

As a result, seven years ago the American middle class ceased to be half of us: it went from two-thirds of Americans when Reagan took office to 49 percent in 2015. NPR commemorated it with the headline: “The Tipping Point: Most Americans No Longer Are Middle Class.”

Last year, according to statistics from the US Census and the Fed, middle class households also sank below the top 1% in total wealth. Last year’s most clear-eyed headline went to Bloomberg: “Top 1% of U.S. Earners Now Hold More Wealth Than All of the Middle Class.”"

Opinion | This Is the Dying Phase of Reaganism—and It's Hideous | Thom Hartmann https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/12/18/dying-phase-reaganism-and-its-hideous

#NeoLiberalism
#Reaganism
#GOPInBedWithRich
#WantTheirSerfsBack

"The question today is whether we as a nation and a people will recover from it, or if it will, as Reagan promised, destroy the American experiment of pluralistic liberal democracy.

Back in 1981, when Ronald Reagan was sworn in and implicitly promised to destroy our government because it was “the problem,” many of us who strongly opposed him wondered what the final stage of Reaganism would look like.

Now we know. We’re there.

Violence toward women and minorities has exploded. Armed militias tried to assassinate the Vice President and Speaker of the House in an attempted coup directed by the Republican President of the United States. They tried to kidnap and murder the Democratic governor of Michigan. They’re blowing up power substations from Oregon to the Carolinas. They’ve embedded themselves in DHS, police departments, and our military. They’re coordinating with fascists overseas.

Leading up to this moment was a 41-year political war that splattered the American Dream like gut-shot blood across a dystopian Republican hellscape mural.

Reaganism brought us:
— the collapse of the middle class;
— student and medical debt that’s impossible to climb out of;
— an explosion of predation from health insurance companies and for-profit hospitals;
— political manipulation by corporations and billionaires;
— an explosion of homelessness and untreated mental illness;
— and turned our elementary schools into killing fields.

The question today is whether we as a nation and a people will recover from it, or if it will, as Reagan promised on January 20, 1981, end the American experiment of pluralistic liberal democracy.

The seeds of Reaganism were planted in 1972 when President Nixon put tobacco lawyer Lewis Powell on the US Supreme Court.

Powell had written his infamous “Memo” a year earlier, arguing that corporate America and the morbidly rich needed to join forces to wrest back control of America after forty years of FDR’s New Deal had empowered middle class union workers, consumers, and environmentalists.

Attacking Ralph Nader... for kicking off the consumer movement with his 1965 book Unsafe At Any Speed and Rachel Carson for the environmental movement with her 1962 book Silent Spring, Powell asserted that “leftists” — middle class socialists and communist sympathizers — had taken over our government, universities, the Supreme Court, and our media:

“Current examples of the impotency of business, and of the near-contempt with which businessmen’s views are held, are the stampedes by politicians to support almost any legislation related to ‘consumerism’ or to the ‘environment.’”

It was the job of big business and the very wealthy to reclaim our nation from the clutches of people concerned about the environment or the rights of average American consumers, Powell wrote:

“Business must learn the lesson, long ago learned by labor and other self-interest groups. This is the lesson that political power is necessary; that such power must be assiduously cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination — without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.”

Once on the Supreme Court, Powell went to work. In 1976, he and his colleagues considered a case that would redefine the next five decades: Buckley v Valeo.

Congress passed strict regulations on political campaign fundraising and spending with the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971. Following the Agnew and Nixon bribery scandals (that led to Vice President Agnew’s resignation to avoid prison), Congress doubled-down by strengthening that law in 1974 and creating the Federal Elections Commission (FEC).

This outraged then-Senator James Buckley, the elder brother of the late William F. Buckley and now the Senior Judge for the DC Circuit Court. Most Republicans opposed those laws and agencies but he and his side in the Senate had lost the vote, so limits on money in political campaigns became law and the FEC was created.

Like a sore loser, he sued, essentially saying that the “free speech” right of wealthy people like himself and his friends to buy off politicians was inhibited by such clean-campaign legislation.

The result, legalizing political bribery, was a first for America and the developed world. The Supreme Court ruled with and for Buckley, striking down nearly a century of campaign finance legislation going all the way back to Teddy Roosevelt’s Tillman Act.

Two years later, in the First National Bank v Bellotti case, Powell himself authored the decision that gave corporations that same legal right to bribe politicians or insert themselves into campaigns for ballot initiatives (among other things)."